by Paula Fox
“Good morning,” Clay replied.
“You’ve been out?” asked Tony.
Clay nodded.
“I’ve been out, too, all night,” said Tony.
There was a red bruise on his right cheek. It looked warm like a dying coal.
“I better get upstairs,” he said. “You going in?”
“We’ll have to take the elevator,” Clay said. Tony shrugged as though that wouldn’t matter.
Tony was thin as a stick. He wore a belt that went twice around his waist. Clay guessed it was his father’s. All except the top button was missing from his green cotton shirt that looked like a girl’s.
The only sound in the lobby was the elevator descending, until a car revved up loudly out on the street. The elevator door opened and closed like a trap—snap! You had to move fast getting in or out. There were new messages spray painted on the walls. One small neat one, written in red crayon, said STOP.
“The daily news,” Tony said, waving at the walls. Then, with no change in his voice, he said, “My father threw the television out the window last night. It didn’t conk anybody, because it fell into the air shaft.”
“Why did he do that?” Clay asked, embarrassed.
“He got mad because he couldn’t get the volume up,” Tony said. He added, “You never can tell.”
Tony’s father was the terror of the seventh floor. People ran into their rooms when they heard his door open. Clay had frequently seen Tony’s mother in the lobby with Tony and his two small sisters, a suitcase and some shopping bags at their feet, as though they were about to leave the hotel. So far they hadn’t.
Clay tried not to stare at the bruise on Tony’s cheek. He knew who had given it to him.
“Good-bye,” Tony said politely as Clay got off on the fifth floor.
For a moment, as he walked down the corridor, Clay thought of what Tony was going home to on the seventh floor.
But in the silent, dirty corridor, his heart began to pound loudly. He could feel it in his throat as though it had crawled up there out of fear. When he unlocked the door, his mother would be asleep in her bed, lying on her back, the bump of the new baby making a round mound like a soccer ball under the blanket. “Ma …” he whispered as he pushed the door open.
The room was washed gray by morning light. Everything was as he had left it, her rumpled brown coat on his cot, the soot-streaked windows, clothes pushed into a bunch on the rack. No one. Silence. Hadn’t he known she wouldn’t be there?
The only color in the room was a red crayon lying on a table where they ate and where his mother filled in forms for Social Services.
The red crayon was one he used to make his own mark on the elevator walls, the corridor walls, sometimes on a patch of sidewalk. The word he always wrote was STOP. He didn’t think people would notice it, because they loved the sex and bathroom words so much, although he had noticed when he rode up in the elevator with Tony that his mark stood out. He didn’t know what he meant by it, but when he glimpsed it as he went about his day, doing errands and going to school, it made him feel like a spy, his mark stronger than all the other words. There was something about it that amused him, too, in a secret way. He slid the crayon into his pocket.
In the book box, there was an envelope that held a few photographs. He might take one of his mother and father standing near the sailing pond in Central Park to show Calvin and Buddy. What an awful idea! A lie! Instead, he took his copy of Robinson Crusoe.
He ought to go. Mrs. Larkin might hear him moving around. He took some socks and underwear and a T-shirt from the suitcase and put them in a paper bag he found beneath the cooking table. A thought slid into his mind. Now he was running away, leaving the hotel. But he would keep a watch on it. He’d find places along the street so that if his mother came back, he’d spot her.
Ma had said his father couldn’t bear it. Now she had gone. Had she, too, not been able to bear it? Was it him? He let himself sink into the question for a minute. He knew that wasn’t so.
It was because everything had fallen away—Daddy, the apartment, things like a television set, a refrigerator, cushions and frying pans, a private bathroom, a telephone, a place of one’s own, a private place among millions of people.
But his mother shouldn’t have gone and left him. It was terrible that she had done that.
He left the room. Radios were playing now. He could hear the rise and fall of many voices. He hurried to the stairway, hoping the first-floor door would be unlocked by this time.
There was dope stuff scattered on the stairs and a few chicken bones and lots of cellophane wrappers and crushed cigarette packs. “Ordure,” he said aloud, another kind than Calvin had meant. He thought of Buddy and Calvin. It didn’t make him happy but he felt slightly less alone.
The first-floor door was locked. He’d have to wait until the security man unlocked it, and then he could get away.
He sat down on a step, suddenly very sleepy. If only his mother had left a note, a word, “I’ll be back soon.…” or “I’ve gone to have the baby.…” What if something had happened to her? An accident? She’d been so blurry these last weeks, like an out-of-focus snapshot. For a long while, he’d missed her quick understanding glance that was nearly always on her face when he looked her way, that seemed to take in everything about him.
His head felt so heavy. He leaned against the railing and almost at once fell asleep.
When he woke up, he could hear the late morning noises beyond the heavy metal door. They were the sounds he heard every Saturday when he ran down the stairs to get out of the room. People spoke excitedly, sometimes in languages he didn’t understand. There were always grumbling arguments that trailed off suddenly into silence, and shrieks of laughter that could suddenly turn into screams.
He stood up and tried the door. It was open. He wondered if anyone had passed him while he slept. There was a trail of coffee grounds on the stairs nearby. Someone must have lugged down a leaking garbage sack. He peeked through the door.
People were lined up at the telephone. He heard someone shout, “But I been waiting now two months!” A huge woman sat on a bench with two babies climbing up and tumbling down from her lap, both of them tied to her by long cords that stretched from their waists to her wrists.
Nobody looked at him. He was used to that. Still, he didn’t count on it. Now and then a person would catch sight of him. He’d been chased all over the hotel, down corridors and up the stairs, once to the roof, where he had hid for hours behind a chimney pot. It was that sudden shift of attention he had to keep himself ready for. Watch out. Stay on your toes, his mother had said.
He slipped out through the lobby to the sidewalk.
He wouldn’t be able to watch for his mother from under the awning of the apartment house across the street. If a kid from the hotel went near the entrance, the doorman, usually leaning up against the wall inside, would start up like a battery-run machine, his feet hitting the floor with great thumps, his elbows pumping, his mouth opening to shout, “Bums! Bums, get going!”
There were sparse hedges he could get behind, an entrance to a dentist’s office, other entries to small stores, and the subway exit at the corner. He could take shelter there if a policeman came along.
There was another place, the news store, diagonally across the street from the hotel, where Abdul, the Arab owner, appeared to dream behind a counter covered with packs of cigarettes, candy, and little packages of cheese and peanut butter crackers. Abdul never seemed to mind his looking at magazine covers as long as he didn’t pick them up. And from inside the store, he could see people as they went by.
But Abdul knew about school hours, though he looked as if he minded no one’s business but his own as he made change, putting magazines in a thin paper bag if a customer asked for one, his eyes looking off somewhere into the distance. Clay knew Abdul recognized him by now, and even might ask him a dangerous question about school in his deep voice. Still, it was Saturday, and he would run
in there if he saw a policeman.
For a long time, Clay stood near the subway exit until he felt so hungry he didn’t even dare look toward Abdul’s. He’d seen Tony pinch candy, doing it swiftly, loading up the pockets of his oversize pants. One day Abdul caught him at it, and now Tony wasn’t allowed in the store.
Suddenly, Clay recollected the money he’d taken from beneath the doughnut box in the hotel room and that was now in his pocket. He went into the news store and bought two packages of cheese and peanut butter crackers, a soda, and a coconut bar. Abdul took the money Clay handed him and gave him change, silent and unquestioning as usual.
Clay walked along the sidewalk, eating. His father would not have liked that. “Animals eat on the run,” he had said once. But that was before, when the Garritys had a small, pleasant kitchen, and a table to eat on, and the outside world of streets and sidewalks was something you passed through to get to other inside places. Even his father might be eating on a street somewhere at this moment. When he finished the soda, he started to throw the can into a trash basket. Then he remembered Buddy’s job and held on to it.
He must have been hanging around the hotel for hours by now. His legs ached. His fingers had stiffened around the can which was too big to fit into a pocket. What he had to do was to sit down, and the only place where he could do that without people noticing him was the little park. He could come back later to keep watch, perhaps after dark.
Calvin was sitting at the entrance to the crate, his legs stretched in front of him, a notebook on his lap. It was the same kind that Clay used in school, except that Calvin’s notebook looked like it was about to fall apart. He was writing in it fiercely, pressing the stub of a pencil hard against a page. On the ground beside him were two small wrinkled apples.
Clay stood silently a moment. He felt timid in front of the old man with his long beard and his strange, cold glance. Buddy was so different, almost neat even when he had worn the raggedy coat over his blue jeans and T-shirt. His crinkly curls grew tight on his head like a black cap, his skin was smooth and dark brown, and he was quick to smile.
Calvin looked up. “You want one of my apples?” he asked. “They fell off a fruit cart.… They’re a bit old, but sweet, I’d guess.” He held one out to Clay, who took it and ate it, more out of gratitude that Calvin had given him something than from hunger. He felt a little sick. The candy bar had been a mistake.
“Was she there?” Calvin asked as if he already knew the answer, which he went on to show he did. “Well, of course not. Or else you wouldn’t be here.”
Clay said nothing.
“I haven’t thought much about these matters,” Calvin continued. “I do not think about children anymore if I can help it. But I am sure you ought to take yourself off to the local police station. Someone may be looking for you. Don’t look so frightened. You’re not a criminal.”
“There are agencies,” Clay said hurriedly. “They would take me away to someplace for good. I won’t be able to look for my mother anymore.” His voice had risen, though he had meant to try and speak calmly. He moved further away from Calvin. “What if she comes back and I’m gone?”
“Then she would go to such an agency and find you,” Calvin said. He spoke evenly, not looking at Clay. “Foster homes. They can be good and bad. At least you’d have a bed of your own and three meals a day, and you’d go to school.”
He looked up at Clay. “You must go to school,” he said. “If you don’t learn a few things in this world, you’ll be as empty as that can you’re carrying.” Clay dropped the can on the ground. “Besides,” Calvin added, “the world will be a dull, dead place if you stay ignorant.”
Clay’s attention was distracted by a movement he glimpsed on the sidewalk. A skinny dog was loping along, cringing as it looked up at the people walking around it. Clay felt awful about lost animals, the kittens set loose in the hotel corridors to starve, the dogs picked up by kids from the street, only to be abandoned or beaten. They were like babies, all the lost animals, babies who couldn’t tell you how they were suffering.
Clay squatted down, facing Calvin. “If I go to a foster home,” he said, “I’ll never see my mother and father again. We’ll be lost from each other forever.”
“You don’t know that,” the old man retorted. “None of us knows what’s ahead.”
“Folks!” cried Buddy as he hurried toward them down the path.
“It’s folk,” said Calvin dryly. “A collective noun like sheep or fish.”
“Okay. Folk,” Buddy said, laughing. “Listen to what happened to me. I was looking for my cans and I found this little shopping bag at the bottom of a trash basket. Inside it was a bunch of credit cards, a driver’s license, and stuff like that. So I went to a phone and got the number from information for the name on the license. And a man answered, and I told him what I’d found. And he said his wife’s purse had been snatched this morning on the subway. He couldn’t thank me enough, he said. We made an arrangement, and he drove down from the Bronx over to the corner of White Street, where I was waiting. He was this elderly fellow and he looked me over and I gave him the bag and he gave me thirty-five dollars. Folk! We’re going to eat tonight! I’m taking you to the diner over on Ninth Avenue. I tell you there are saints in this world!”
“There are no saints,” Calvin said ferociously.
“There’s Gerald,” Buddy said. “And the ones who bring the boxes of clothing. And the ones at the church. And that old fellow giving me that money for those cards he won’t be able to use anyhow. Come on, Calvin!”
Calvin said, “All right, all right … maybe there are three saints. Not more, I think.”
5 The Coffee Van
“What are you writing, Calvin?” Clay asked.
“A history of my life and times,” Calvin replied, glancing over at Clay, who had let Robinson Crusoe fall onto his lap.
It was early morning, a quiet time before the heavier traffic started up. Gerald had been bringing extra milk for Clay, who had begun to like it with a drop of coffee for warmth. He finished it now and put the cup inside the crate for Dimp Laughlin and his dog, even though Dimp hadn’t been around for a few days. Yesterday, the cold had been bitter, the sky the color of metal. But today, though it was dank, there were rays of pale, mothy sunlight that Clay watched move across the scattered newspapers people had slept beneath, discarded garbage sacks, a mud-caked boot on its side under a bench, the grainy surface of the drinking fountain that no longer worked.
In the two weeks Clay had been living in the park, Buddy had found several things to improve their living arrangement—a crescent of hard plastic that now shielded the entrance of the crate, another piece of tarp to cover its west side, which took the brunt of the river wind, and a straight-backed chair in which Calvin was at present sitting, his feet in slippers that appeared to have been cut out of an old pink carpet.
There were a few people clustered at the counter of the van. Buddy had left on his daily round to find cans to redeem, saying it would be a good morning because of all he’d eaten at the Unitarian Church several blocks away, where he and Clay and Calvin had gone for Thanksgiving dinner. Wrapped tightly in plastic and hidden in the back of the crate was a paper dish full of leftover turkey parts, hard to chew but still pretty good.
“Is your life going to fit inside that notebook?” Clay asked.
“This is the eleventh notebook I’ve filled,” Calvin replied. “I’m up to age forty-seven.”
“You told me the story of your life when I first came, and it took you about three minutes,” Clay remarked.
“That was an outline. Each time you tell the story, there’s more.… Any life is infinite. Imagine a single hour, all that happens in it.”
“But what if I’m reading, or just staring at something for an hour?” asked Clay.
“Do you think your brain leaves town? It’s always working, with or without your permission. What you think and feel is as much of a story as the things that happen outsid
e you.”
Clay didn’t entirely understand what the old man was saying, but he was grateful to have a conversation with him, especially since Calvin wasn’t, as he often was, talking about Clay going to the police and foster homes.
Sometimes the two men paid little attention to him, although he knew they had really taken him into their lives in the park.
But on some days, there had been moments, hours, when they barely spoke to him as they went about their housekeeping, or just sat silently with grim, faraway expressions on their faces. Then he knew that his being a child, a thing he’d never thought about much before, made no difference at all. He was alone as they were alone. He was just another person, ageless, in trouble, out of ordinary life, out of the time that ruled the lives of people hurrying past the park on their way to work or home.
“Do you know something, Clay?” Calvin’s voice broke into his thoughts. “You need a haircut.”
He was a fine one to talk, Clay thought to himself. Birds could have built nests in his hair and beard.
“It’s different for me,” said Calvin. “I’m an old tree. But you look merely ratty. Now, don’t sulk.”
“I’m not,” Clay protested.
“Your face is sulking. Do something about it. Just let me trim your hair. I have a pair of scissors somewhere, dull, but they’ll do.”
“But—what for?” asked Clay.
“To hold on to neatness, call it staying neat in a cyclone. Call it what you like. All of us, living as we must, disgust the people who bother to look at us. They blame us for the way we look and smell. They’re scared of really poor people.”
“But poor people are scared of each other too,” Clay said, thinking about the hotel.
“That’s true, but the reasons are different. As I was saying, people begin to think of us as nasty stains on the sidewalk, nasty things in their way.” He paused and looked up at the sky. “I think we’ll have snow one of these days soon.” He went to the crate, leaned inside, and began to rummage in one of his sacks, from which he soon drew a small pair of scissors.
